My life as an anachronism
I don't exist. I don't. Gay men like me are not supposed to be real. Yet here I am. I exist and I am not supposed to.
I feel all this social pressure to be something that I seem unable to be and am not even sure if it is what I want yet I still feel like I am supposed to be that.
I am a gay man and I am supposed to have a hot, hot body - yet I don't. I am average at best. I don't have really great hair that is sculpted according to the latest style. I do not have the right clothes or jeans or trousers (do gay men even use that word?). I don't wear the right cologne and I certaintly don't have the right shoes.
I am supposed to be sexually liberated and sleep with whatever man I want to (and of course he will be stylish, attractive with a really hot body and a full set of really white teeth). Yet I am not, I am sort of old fashioned and romantic about love and sex and my body and who I am willing to give it to. I am/was there for the newest sexual revolution yet I still don't feel that sleeping around is quite me. But it appears to me that that is what all the other gay and bi-sexual men are doing.
I am supposed to be confident, I have a masters degree, talent, lots of friends, a sense of humour, a supporting and loving family and thing always go my way (not to mention my really supportive boyfriend/life partner). Yet I don't always feel like I have these things and most of them are intangible and meaningless to me because I can not seem them in myself only in other people.
I feel all these pressures to be all of these things that I am not. I am supposed to be the model of a group and look and act like everyone else, and this is supposed to make me happy.
Yet I am not happy.
I want to not have to feel all of these pressures. I want to take away TV and film and ads and radio and the media and be allowed to be me. I realise that I am the one doing this to myself but it feels like everone else is doing it to me since it seems that the average other person does conform or fit to the cookie cutter regiment.
How is it that I am supposed to exist as one thing, and be seen as that one thing - yet internally feel like a completely different thing?
Why is it that when I make a decision that is healthy and good for me people behave like I have made an atrocious mistake because it makes me not fit into the cookie cutter world?
I realise that everyone feels a pressure to conform and be "normal" and right now I am feeling that pressure intensly and all I want to find is me.
posted by No one asked us @ 7:12 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Don't be 'normal, cookie-cutter', or anything that isn't YOU.
If you're yourself, you'll respect yourself, and we'll like you better.
And I know a few gay men "like you", for lack of a better phrase. Some of us prefer real people to the 2-dimensional, A&F wannabes.
:)
Thanks Dickey
I agree, but I just felt that I had to be poetic about it. For some reason yesterday I saw all these plastik people and it seemed like they were having so much fun, but it is an allusion.
The plastic people aren't worth our time.
They have their own issues hidden beneath their masks.
i don't know why, but this is reminding me of in high school when bunches of people wanted to be like 'the popular kids', but if you talked to the 'popular kids' a lot of them were just as miserable, but felt like they couldn't be themselves because they had an image to maintain.
i don't have anything particular to add to this, except that i love your clothes, i love your shoes, i love your hair, i love your glasses, i love your look. i wouldn't want you to be a 'cookie cutter' anything.
i love you.
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